


Zirkus der Reisen

by contraltosaurus



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: A lot of gore and death and murder and general fucked-upedness, American Horror Story: Freak Show AU, Conjoined Twins Reiner, Dark versions of characters, Different spellings of names, Dwarf Levi, F/F, F/M, Family Dynamic, Giant Bertholt, Hermaphrodite Hange Zoë, Intersex Mike Zacharius, M/M, Multi, One-Armed Erwin, Other, Trans Armin Arlert, Trans/intersex Nanaba, or really just a freak show AU, probably more tags to be added later on
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-24
Updated: 2015-09-08
Packaged: 2018-04-16 23:10:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4643493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/contraltosaurus/pseuds/contraltosaurus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Munich, Bavaria. Late 1800s. </p><p>Acrobat Levi Ackermann has never had it easy, especially when he's only fifty-five inches tall. But neither have his family--a one-armed strongman, a Japanese contortionist, a wheelchair-bound sadist, and a boy who acts more like a dog than a boy--and they've found quite the way to capitalize on their unique situation. </p><p>(Not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi recounts his first twenty-six years of life, before the Zirkus was even an idea in his mind.

My name is Levi Ackermann.

I was born on Christmas morning in 1842 in a little house in Karlin. My birth—or, rather, my survival—was nothing short of a Christmas miracle. The story goes that the first remark my uncle uttered upon meeting my tiny infant form, after a premature and apparently rather painful ordeal, was that he didn’t think I had quite finished my prenatal development, and that I had been a bit too eager to escape the womb. My mother responded that had my head been allowed to grow any more, I would have killed her right then and there.

My father was present only at my conception, or, at least I assume he was. Mother never spoke of him. Forgive me for saying such things--my family follows only the old book--but perhaps she was but a virgin mother, and I was the second coming of that Messiah, so hated by his countrymen.

Hated indeed. In every litter of baby animals, there is the runt—the puppy or kitten that dies, whimpering pitifully, because its littermates push it from its mother’s teat. I identify strongly with these animals.

I was always small. Always a few inches shorter than the other children my age. I never thought too much of it, until I found myself at thirteen years old and hardly larger than a boy of five. “Your grandfather was a small boy,” my mother said, in her feeble attempts at comforting me. “He grew a whole foot in his teenage years.” She sacrificed every morsel of food to me in the hopes that I would grow tall, up until the day she died.

 

February 1855

The funeral took place on a misty grey morning. Though the snows were all thawed, the rain was still constant.

“Ha'makom yenahem etkhem betokh she'ar avelei Tziyonvi'Yerushalayim,” we heard, over and over again, from the rabbi and a few neighbors. The only ones walking through the shura were myself, my older brothers Simon and Reuben, our four younger siblings, and my uncle. There was no one else to mourn my mother.

The rain hadn’t stopped by the time we had finished our seudat havra’ah. I left the house, eager to escape the forced niceties and all the expressions of condolence, and stepped into the muddy path outside our house. I walked until I found shelter under a willow, and prayed under my breath until a loud voice interrupted me in a thick English brogue.

“Whatcha doin’?”

I looked up to see a child, about nine or ten, peering at me through thick spectacles.

“Praying,” I answered glumly, frowning. My accent was strong, but I wasn’t dumb, and I knew my three languages: German, English and Hebrew.

“For the rain to let up?”

I was silent, still frowning.

“I found a frog.” Said amphibian was produced out of a large raincoat pocket.

The child’s eyes were blown comically out of proportion by the glass, looking so genuinely curious and innocent, and the frog let out the most gentle little ribbit, that I just had to laugh. I laughed until tears dripped down the side of my face and my sides ached, and the bespectacled child laughed with me. We sat together, gasping for air and hiccuping and huddling together for warmth, and pet the frog's little snout.

“My name’s Hange. I’m only livin’ in Karlin ‘til the summer starts, and then we’re movin’ back ta Wick.”

“I’m Levi. I live here. I don’t know where’s Wick.” My eyes took in the mess of curly hair atop Hange’s head, the muddied cotton dress, the soaked pantalettes, the small leather shoes. “Are you...a boy? Or girl?”

“Um.” The big brown eyes were downcast, a previously boisterous voice now gone quiet. “You answer first.”

“I’m a boy!” I replied, laughing. “Clear as day. Now you.” I pointed at Hange’s chest.

The child was shy. The frog was returned to its pocket. “I’m...not sure.”

“How can you not be sure?”

The child stood, nimble hands simultaneously lifting up the gown and pulling down the pantalettes until there was nothing to shield the pale midsection. “Hold my gown up,” Hange instructed, and I did, mouth falling slightly open as the truth was revealed. The child took their little cock in one hand and lifted it up slightly, pulling down their naked pink lips with the fingers of their other hand. “I got both, see? So I don’t know if I’m one or the other.”

“That is...amazing,” I marvelled, staring, and then I caught myself and met Hange’s gaze. “You don’t have to be boy or girl. You are just you.” Hange smiled, and their big brown eyes smiled too. It didn’t matter who they were--I was just happy to have made my first friend.

That afternoon, they showed me their rock collection, and their beetle collection, and their leaf collection, and their flower collection...and I was having trouble remembering all the names. So I suggested that we carve our initials into the willow under which we met, and our heights as well.

“I come back to the tree when I small years older, find if I am growing taller,” I explained in broken English.

Hange laughed. “You’re a boy, ‘member? You’ll grow big and tall, I promise ya.”

 

December 1858

My mother’s sacrifice was for naught; the growth spurt never came. Three years later, I was a man, ready to face the world, and I was still only four and a half feet tall.

I accepted my fate and, with a heavy brow and a continual frown on my lips, left my home and never turned back. I never wanted to see the condescending pity on the faces in Karlin again.

I took up the hobby of pickpocketing, which was ever the easier thanks to my stature. This later evolved into the full-fledged art of thievery. In my youth my uncle had taught me the ways of the knife and the pistol, having been a paranoid sort of man. I honed these talents; I prided myself on my skill. During my travels around the Germanic states I even gained a bit of mysterious reputation for myself, inspiring a well-founded fear of children in those from whom I stole. I wore a hood, shielding my face; who could say the famous burglar wasn’t merely a lad?

 

November 1862

That life was halted abruptly when I was twenty years old. Having taken up a semi-permanent residence in an unusual period of calmness, I received a letter from some cousin or another. My brother Simon and his young Oriental wife had allegedly been offed, no doubt by some anti-Semitic scheisskopf. Our other siblings were scattered throughout America and beyond contact, and thus the care of his daughter went to me. The picture that was sent to me alongside the letter made me narrow my eyes; she was a spitting image of her mother, as if she had hardly a drop of Jewish blood in her body.

I never liked children. That is, until I met Mikasa.

My first impression of her wasn’t exactly stellar. Upon taking in my appearance, she asked if I was a little child like her. I responded, as kindly as I possibly could, in the negative, and that she should pay me more respect if I would be her guardian.

“I don’t understand,” she said, with an innocence that I felt I was robbing. “Vati is the one who takes care of me.”

“Vati isn’t living anymore,” I told her, very plainly. “I’m your Vati now.” The words sounded strange at first. Me, Levi Ackermann, taking on a child. Becoming a father. Charged with the responsibility of another human life.

The innocence seemed to leave her eyes at this statement, and they lost their sparkle. She nodded in understanding.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone, much less a toddler, handle the concept of death with as much grace as my niece did. The notion impressed me and terrified me all at once; I knew that there was a great potential for danger in that soul, just waiting to be nurtured.

Therefore, I did the only thing I could do—I trained her in my ways. She became skilled with the knife, her nimble hands grasping it lightly and yet with so much power and energy. We grew strong together. She was determined to match me in strength and in flexibility, and she might have succeeded, if not for the fact that I was a (relatively) fully-grown male and she a young girl.

 

June 1866

I was twenty-four when I met my other half.

There I was, in a tavern, shirking my fatherly responsibilities for a brief moment to get absolutely shitfaced while Mikasa awkwardly interacted with the other children outside. It was a hot day and the men were laughing brusquely over their beers, gambling and playing chess. I had my back turned to the table, but I heard the squeaking of chair legs against the hardwood floor as one of them stood. A deep voice called out as I sat at the bar, nursing my fifth tankard of stout: “Aren’t you a little young to be in this establishment, bub?”

Whether it was due to the alcohol or to my ever-present earache continues to vex me, but a rage filled my mind at that moment. “You call me bub _once more_ ,” I warned, and within seconds I had spun around to face the source of the voice, charging forward to land a solid punch to the abdomen in front of me. With a gentle grunt, the man staggered backwards, and it was then that I took him in: he towered over me, at least six feet tall, with a muscular build and a handsome face, and his right arm was completely and utterly absent.

“You wouldn’t hit a cripple, would you?” he leered, with an infuriatingly attractive smirk.

Shock subsided, I let the same expression cross my face. “You’re a _freak_.”

I don’t exactly recall my thought process at that time, but within thirty seconds we were scrambling into a broom closet, frantically wrestling each other’s clothes off. His name was Erwin Schmidt, I learned, as my lips closed around him and my head bobbed along the thick shaft of his cock.

Erwin was the first man I had ever met to treat me like a fellow man. He wasn’t afraid of hurting me. He kissed me roughly and bit my lip, bit my shoulder, bit the sharp jut of my hip. He held me against the wall with his arm—his incredibly strong arm—and fucked me like the world was about to end. It wasn’t my first time being intimate with a man, but it was my first time with a cock inside of me. There was blood--quite a bit, actually. But the pain felt like paradise compared to the pain I endured every day of my life.

We gazed into each other’s eyes, slickness coating our chests. I lay spent in the cradle of his arm and he kissed me again—softer now. Caring.

I mouthed along the shell of his ear, tugging gently at the lobe. “My name is Levi,” I told him, and drew the flat of my tongue against the front of his empty shoulder, coaxing a dulcet chuckle from him.

“Levi,” he repeated like a chant, tasting the name in his mouth, peppering my throat with open-mouthed kisses. “Levi. Levi.”

When two people meet, their minds and their bodies need time to form the bond we commonly refer to as love. The same principle does not apply when two souls find each other, two lights coming together in the dark void of an unforgiving world.

Society was crafted with the working man in mind: a tall frame with two strong arms. I possessed one of these traits; Erwin possessed the other. We completed each other; there was no doubt in my mind that fate had dropped him at my doorstep.

I introduced him to Mikasa before we set on our way. She looked over him with a scrupulous, critical gaze before nodding her approval. “How’d you lose your arm?” she asked, with the sort of casualness that could only be obtained by having a deformed guardian.

“Never lost it—it just never grew,” he answered with a shrug. She raised her eyebrows slightly and then turned away, set on visiting the candy shop down the street.

“She’s sharp,” Erwin muttered to me, smiling serenely. “I like her.” He glanced down. “She has your eyes.”

 

April 1867

“He has your eyes” was, coincidentally, the first thing I thought regarding the next acquisition to our family unit.

It was nearly one year later, in Erwin’s old stomping grounds. At the close of a brief visit to a childhood friend, he happened upon a former lover in the drawing room. Her eyes narrowed furiously at the sight of him, and she nearly dropped the teapot she was holding. “You.”

“Maria,” he started, clearly not calling out to the Virgin. “Are you…”

“Married to Nile?" she spat, looking around at the quaint but well-furnished little home. "I am. I requested that you stay off the wedding invitation list.”

Erwin laughed, without an ounce of humor. “I’m almost flattered that you took such pains to remove me from your life.”

Maria met the sarcasm with a sneer of her own and tilted her head. “It’s impossible to remove you when I have your freak offspring hanging around.”

“My… _what?”_

As if on cue, a little child (appearing to be a boy, if clothes and hairstyles were anything to go by, although there was a feminine charm to his round face), wheeled into the room in a chair. He was small and gaunt and had a sparkle in his eye, and yet his cheeks were tear-stained. He sniffed and held up a dove by its legs. The bird's abdomen had been sliced down the middle, and it looked to be mostly rid of its internal organs. Blood dripped languidly down the boy's arm.

"Mütterlein," he said quietly, pouting his lip slightly. When she looked at him, he smiled, apparently placated by her attention.

Not so much as a gasp escaped her, although I felt about ready to vomit and Erwin looked the same. "Get that thing out of here," she hissed at him, seeming only perturbed at the prospect of blood-stains on the rug. I shuddered as I searched the perimeter of the sheepskin and found a cluster of telling splotches of pale orange.

Erwin swallowed hard and bent to the boy's height, one hand on his knee. "You're already learning how to butcher, jungling?"

"No." The child looked down regretfully at his work, and--to the churning of my stomach--cradled the bird to his chest, stroking its beak. "This is Flaumig.”

“And so was the last one, and the last one before that. No more Flaumigs.” I gulped. The babe’s eyes were clear as the sky as he gazed up at his mother. She would not be swayed; _“No more Flaumigs!”_

The child hurled the bird to the ground, where it landed and dispersed with a gooey splat. Bile rose in my throat, and I closed my eyes to the mess. I heard the boy begin crying as he realized what he’d done, and then the mother began crying as well. The smell of gore wafted into my nostrils and I made for the door, looking back to see her slap Erwin across the face. The little boy screamed and Maria raised her voice still. I listened to her words as they flew out of her mouth.  

“One fucking tryst, one stupid night, that’s all it took to--to _contaminate_ me with your _freak_ genes! She’s sick in the head _and_ weak as a lamb. Came down with polio as a babe and never walked again, all because of her crippled father.”

“She?” I spoke up, glancing for just a second at the child with blood-stained knickerbockers.

Maria shot icicles in my direction with her red-rimmed glare. “She calls herself a boy, refuses to wear dresses, cuts her hair.” She sighed. “We let her have her fun. It’s the least fucked up thing about her.”

“I’m a _boy!_ My name is _Armin!”_ the child screamed. Erwin was still nursing the side of his face with his palm. My mind wandered back to Hange, to the freedom they must have felt when I told them they could be whoever they were.

 _“Her_ name is Adele,” Maria corrected, and opened the door, waving dismissively in our direction. “Take her and be gone. I don’t want this stain on my life any longer.”

Erwin didn’t outright refuse, but his eyebrows rose. “What of her belongings? Her clothes, her toys?”

Maria threw her head back and snorted. “We’ll pawn them.” Then she slammed the door.

The child--the _whatever_ he or she wanted to call themself--looked up at us, blue eyes expectant and impossible to resist. Erwin stood behind the chair and shrugged, wheeling it forward and out onto the road. I followed, dumbfounded.

“Tough world,” Mikasa said bluntly to her new sibling. She’d been in the corner watching the whole thing, I realized, and hadn’t made a peep. Poor thing. There was an awkward pause, quickly ended by her introduction. “My name is Mikasa.”

“My name is Armin. I’m a boy, I _swear_ it, even though I’ve got girly parts. I’m a boy.”

“I believe you,” Mikasa replied softly, and stroked his hair. “I’ll teach you how to be cleaner with a knife.”

A small cry escaped my mouth and I looked to the heavens. _God, you have blessed me with the most gorgeous cripple alive, and the two most diabolical little monsters. This is a very, very funny joke._

 

October 1868

“Diabolical” isn’t a word I would use to describe our third child, though “monster” isn’t far from the truth.

I can’t remember how we found ourselves wandering through the forest, but there we were, lost somewhere in the heart of the Schwartzwald. We’d built a little carriage of sorts; it was as good a home as any, as long as we had a roof over our heads, and we were hauling it past pines and aspens and oaks when we heard a terrible sound.

It was the wailing of a child in pain, but...it was like no pain I had ever heard.

Mikasa took off sprinting, and I followed her.

When I saw him for the first time, I cried. I fell to my knees and cried as my heart broke in two. I wanted to hold him, cradle him, _something_ \--but I could not go forward.

“Mutter Gottes,” Erwin whispered behind me, and Mikasa approached slowly, stony eyes betraying none of her emotions.

We found him lying there, in a pool of his own blood, naked, sprawled lamely at the root of a birch. The white bark was smeared with crimson. He was gnawing weakly on the exposed muscles of his arm, which was dangling from the front of his sternum.

It was the last of the limbs he had managed to remove, evidently; two legs and another arm lay around him like a little nest of flesh. Other chunks of muscle and bone had fallen around him as well, pieces he’d hacked off after the main job was finished. The places where his arms and legs had been were jagged stumps on his body--the side of his shoulder, his lower back, his hip. Around the limbs were scattered medical instruments, saws and scalpels and syringes and the like, all gleaming with blood.

He screamed again, through his teeth, as he bit down. I heard the crunch of the stringy muscle between his teeth. The air was otherwise still; a cricket chirped, a bird sang. The boy sobbed and screamed, bits of tendon sticking from his incisors. The autumn leaves were red and orange, made all the more vibrant from his blood. A chill prickled my skin as my vision blurred, clouds of red and red and red.

I wiped my tears and crawled forward, holding his head in my hands. He was babbling incoherently, close to the point of unconsciousness. Tiny pricks of blood dotted his throat and his chest. He must have pumped himself full of anesthetic before he began, but no amount of dope could erase that sort of pain. I tore off my shirt and ripped it into rags, dressing his wounds to stop the blood flow.

“What _is_ it?” Armin inquired.

“A child,” his father replied.

“I think it’s an _animal,”_ Armin retorted, and crawled to the boy’s other side, stroking his cheek. “I always wanted a puppy.” His smile was eerie in the face of so much horror, eyes round as dinner plates in his awe. He lifted up a severed leg. “Vati, may I keep it?”

Their words were lost to me as my head flooded with anxiety. The boy’s head fell heavily on my shoulder, and I lifted up his body. “You’ll make it,” I said, again and again, and began moving. I carried him in my arms all the way to the hospital, unaware of where my family was or what they were saying. This boy’s life was the only thing in my mind.

And he did make it. The surgeons removed the last extraneous limb from his chest while he slept, and several days later he opened his eyes.

I cried then, too, when he finally woke up. He had an entire spectrum of colors in his eyes, green and blue and gold and violet, as if his survival was a ray of warm sun after a terrible storm. I held him, not even knowing his name until he spoke to me.

“I’m Eren...Eren Jäger," he told me as I cradled him. His voice shook, but he managed to tell me all I needed to know. “Vater is a doctor, Mutter is a b-barmaid. Vater left...M-Mutter left...they all--they all left. I heard them...said I was an...ab-ab-abomination. They--they didn’t want me like I was. I had to...fix myself--oh, mein Gott--" He collapsed into tears again, frantically shaking his head in disbelief.

The boy had run away while his parents were out, taking his father’s surgery instruments, hoping to return home a normal lad. _Ha._ "Normal." _Fuck_ normality. My fingers tightened slightly against him as I attempted to clench my fists, but I pushed away my frustration and replaced it with fondness.

“You’re perfect to me,” I said to him, over and over, until he slept again. "Eren...Eren...Eren." With my lips pressed against his forehead, I said his name again and again, like my own savior had said to me in that broom closet.

Eren was my little miracle. My misshapen, broken, fucked-up little miracle. I loved him like a real son. In the moment when he first called out to me, alone and afraid and unsure of where he belonged in the world, I felt the presence of God with us. He was a blessing, an angel sent down to earth with his wings torn off. There were horrible scars where they had been severed, but his face...well, his face was undeniably cherubic.

He slept while the surgeons discharged him, and I carried him out to our carriage and laid him in blankets of cotton and down. I kissed his forehead and moved aside, letting Mikasa and Armin fuss over him. Mikasa wrapped him in her scarf, a mass of blood-red wool that we’d bartered from a Sinti woman--judging from Eren’s skin tone, he was probably a Sinti as well.

Armin crawled out of his chair to straddle the boy’s hips, and leaned over his face, drawing a small index finger over his features. Eren’s eyes opened and met the blonde’s, and he opened his mouth in a silent cry. Armin pressed his lips against the boy’s mouth and then drew away, smiling. “Hündchen,” he murmured.

“It’s...it’s Eren,” was the response.

“Shhh, hündchen.” Armin covered his mouth and smiled. “Don’t speak.” Their foreheads touched, and for a moment I thought I saw something like genuine affection in Armin’s wide blue eyes. “Your eyes are beautiful. So is your mouth. May I kiss you again?”

Eren was silent, which Armin took for a “yes,” and kissed him while Mikasa pet his hair. The boys made soft noises as their bodies rolled awkwardly together, discovering the feeling of another human against themselves. I shook my head and looked away, leaning against Erwin’s shoulder.

“You’ve taken to him,” my lover told me, mouth tight.

“He’s my boy now,” I replied, as simply as if it were the truth. “He has my heart.” Erwin frowned, the muscles in his arm tensing and relaxing. I felt a leaden weight settle in my chest.

Behind me, Eren grunted in protest, causing Armin to pull away, and turned his head to look at me. He reached for my hand with his; I took it urgently and curled beside him, shoving Armin aside. “Meine liebe,” I murmured, kissing each of his little knuckles.

“I’m frightened,” he whispered, shutting his eyes tight.

I held him against myself and glanced at the others. He was with his own, now; his new family. His sister and brother were a fearsome Japanese girl and a boy with twisted legs, and his fathers were a dwarf and a one-armed man. He was with people who wouldn’t judge him for being different, but rather embrace his uniqueness. There was nothing for him to fear now. We were his family--his misshapen, broken, fucked-up little family.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Language notes:  
> Ha'makom yenahem etkhem betokh she'ar avelei Tziyonvi'Yerushalayim = May God console you among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem  
> seudat havra’ah = first meal after a Jewish funeral  
> scheisskopf = shithead  
> Vati = Daddy  
> bub = slang term for "boy"  
> Mütterlein = Mommy  
> Flaumig = Fluffy  
> Mutter Gottes = Mother of God  
> mein Gott = my God  
> hündchen = puppy  
> meine Liebe = my love
> 
> For clarification, Eren was born with quadruple polymelia, but many of the disorders/disabilities that the characters suffer from in this story had not yet been discovered or named at this point.
> 
> This AU is going to fuck me up, I swear. There's a lot in store for all of our little freaks. Thank you for reading!


	2. Birds of a Feather

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi meets an old friend, and new ideas are hatched.

August 1870

I didn’t expect to have acquired an entirely new family when I met my best friend again. And I never expected to find them in their...situation.

We were just leaving München, having stayed for a few weeks to rest and stock up on necessities. A large and colorful tent fluttered gently in the breeze ahead of us, and sounds of music emanated from it. Erwin and I shared a glance that signified we were equally curious, and so we headed towards it. A string quartet played beneath the shade of the tent; the piece was a Mendelssohn work by the sound of it. I told Erwin to take the children over to them to listen, while I investigated a smaller tent near it.

I wasn’t investigating out of pure curiosity. There were noises coming from the tent. And they certainly weren’t a Mendelssohn quartet.

I tiptoed up to the flap of the curtain--moving quietly was a useful skill--and pulled it back to see what was inside. I threw a hand over my mouth to keep myself from crying out. Time had aged them, as it would age anyone, but the mop of brown hair spilling from their head, the thick glasses on the floor beside them, and the curious development of both male and female genitalia… I recognized them clear as day.

Hange Zowie. There they were, with a cock in their mouth and another in their ass, fingers groping blindly at their own parts. They were flanked by two attractive blondes, one of whom sniffed the air and turned his head slowly to me, the other whom shrieked and pointed at me. In an instant, Hange’s mouth was freed and their head spun around. The man penetrating them from behind pulled out, cock gone soft from the interruption.

“Who the…” They’d learned to speak German. Good--my English wasn’t any better.

“I never grew any taller than when you met me,” I said softly, and pulled the curtain back to reveal my full height.

Their eyes squinted, but they grabbed at their spectacles and their face lit up when they recognized me. “Levi!” Still entirely in the nude, Hange leapt up and ran at me, embracing me. My reciprocation was more hesitant, but possessed the same sentiment.

“So, uh… Who are these fellows?”

The shorter blonde’s genitals were quickly covered by a trembling hand. Hange walked over and extended their arms to both of their partners. “This is Michel Zacharias and his lovely wife Johanna, Nana for short. She’s a bit shy around strangers.”

Nana raised her free hand to wave at me, a small obligatory smile crossing her lips. Her naked torso revealed the presence of two small, round breasts that jiggled slightly with her shaking. “I know I’ve got...I’ve got _this,_ but I’m a girl,” she said in a small voice, looking downwards.

I threw my head back and laughed. “My son’s got a pussy. I understand.” She smiled a bit more at this, and didn’t seem so ashamed. Hanji's eyes narrowed at me playfully, clearly hopeful that I could introduce them to said son.

"Michel and Nana are writers from down in Wien," Hange explained. "Poets, really. Beautiful way with words. And they can both play piano." They held out their hand to Nana, who took it and stood. The brunette kissed her softly on the mouth. Mike, who had stood as well, crossed behind his wife and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. She wasn't a short woman, but he towered over her still. Hange stepped into a pair of loose pants and a dress shirt that, unbuttoned, exposed most of their chest, and haphazardly tied up their hair with a yellow ribbon. I waited for them to come to me; when they did, they bade Michel and Johanna good-bye, and took me by my arm. "I take it you heard the sweet sounds of our household band?" We headed towards Erwin, who was chatting up the first violinist, and the little ones, who were using sticks to draw pictures in the dirt.

"Yeah." I laughed. "You like to fuck to Mendelssohn?"

"Oh, if we had an entire orchestra, I would ask for a Wagner overture!" Hange laughed, too. "But the sex is good no matter what's in the background."

"You hook up with them often? Like a ménage à trois or something?"

"Any time we're all in the mood." Hange looked back at their tent with a sort of wistfulness. "Nana likes to be with people who make her feel like she's not a freak."

I kept my eyes on the ground in front of me. _Oh, do I know that feeling..._

Erwin noticed us, and briskly approached. I took the liberty of introducing them to each other. "Erwin, my childhood friend Hange Zowie. Hange, my partner Erwin Schmidt."

Hange's eyes widened excitedly. "Partner? Like, married-kinda partner?"

Erwin stooped to give me a long kiss, his breath hot in my mouth. "Not yet," he murmured. I smiled and pecked the tip of his nose just before the children began to advance.

We spoke with the entire group over a pitcher of dark beer, roasted potatoes with herbs, and warm loaves of brown bread with Liptauer. I thanked Nana many times for the meal; she was an excellent cook, and it was a blessing to have a hearty midday meal, rather than the conservative and sporadic snacks we ate in the wagon.

I learned that the group living in the structure was an artistic coalition of sorts, a communal gathering of creative minds. There were the four musicians--violinists Petra Ral and Günther Schultz from Berlin, violist Adrien Bouchard from Strasbourg, and cellist Eldon Jinks from London. Then there were the poets Mike and Nana. And I learned that Hange had become interested in art through their “friend” Moblit Berner from Geneva, who was the last one introduced. However, according to the lad, Moblit had been trained for many years with classical rigor, while Hange's brand of art was a tad more _chaotic_. The bespectacled enigma called themself an inventor by trade--an inventor of whatever they thought could be invented.

I held Eren close to me while he ate, brushing off crumbs of bread that fell onto his shirt. When a smear of Liptauer ended up on his cheek, Armin wiped it up with a finger and licked it up. "Armin, manners," I scolded him. "It's not very often that we eat with company, but Vati will not have you acting like a fool around his friends."

Armin scowled at me and crawled over to the comfort of his father, planting a kiss on his lips. "Vati, am I acting foolish?"

The man lifted his son into his lap and stroked his hair as one would a cat. "Nein, liebchen."

I shot Erwin a glare. Armin looked triumphant.

That evening, the quartet entertained us with Beethoven and Haydn and Mozart; all of the children fell asleep, but it was nice to see how calm and peaceful they looked when they slept. That was the first night of the terrors.

In the middle of an energetic Haydn allegro, Eren shouted in his sleep. Mikasa bolted upright, ready to defend herself; Armin opened his eyes slowly and merely looked annoyed. The little brunette was thrashing and kicking in his seat on the long couch on which we sat--he screamed a blood-curdling scream, and the bows of the quartet screeched on their strings as they stopped.

"He's just having a nightmare," Erwin told me quietly.

"That's no nightmare," I said, and held him in my arms until he was still again, sound asleep. I was shaking as well. To see my little one like that...well, it forced me to recall the way we found him, helpless and mangled and in so much pain.

The quartet continued while the others watched us with concern; later on, after putting the munchkins down to bed, Erwin and I approached Hanji to apologize. We sat around the fire, sipping the remnants of the dunkel in silence until Hange touched my knee.

"Little guy's been through a lot, huh?" they asked me, with a sad smile.

"More than anyone should have to go through." I looked down, scowling. "It's hard, being us. Being _different._ As if we're no use to the normals."

"You and your family aren't alone here, you know. Everyone in this community is cast out from where they came, even if they don’t got things wrong with their body. They're criminals, or addicts, or gamblers, or just plain awkward." Hange kicked a pebble and sighed. “Birds of a feather, you know.”

“Only, instead of flying together, we hide together,” I murmured in reply. Hange nodded with a bitter smile.

Erwin had been silent, but now he made a vague noise of contemplation, and cleared his throat. “You don’t suppose there’s a way we didn’t have to?”

“What, hide? We’ll never be accepted.” Hange’s tone was insistent but questioning.

“Not in the context of society as a whole,” Erwin said, his voice even as always. He turned his gaze to me; I took his hand in mine, leaning against him. “But within our own sphere, we are normal.”

I studied him for a moment, my brows heavily furrowed. “Spit it out.”

He squeezed my hand. “Remember Berlin?”

Before Armin had been given over to Erwin, we had traveled with Mikasa up to Berlin, and took her to see the Circus Olympic. I thought it was silly and overwrought, with no ounce of genuine substance, but Mikasa’s eyes had been shining the entire time. She’d pulled at my sleeves as we watched acrobats fly and spin and tumble, telling me that she wanted to be just like them. “You’re not thinking…” I shook my head, suddenly drawing away from my partner. “You don’t mean to put our children into a circus, you madman!”

“A circus?” Hange exclaimed, their hands balling into fists. “Fantastic!”

“What better way to exist freely and make a living at the same time?” Erwin said coolly, wrapping his arm around me. “We have talent, we have spectacles, we have entertainment. We just need to organize it into a cohesive performance.”

“Performance? You mean a _freak show._ A demonstration of grotesque monstrosities. My babies made into fools.” I tried to imagine that little devil Armin wheeling around, introducing each act as the next deformed creature up in line to be shown off. Eren, poor, innocent Eren, who’d never had any idea what it would be like to live as anything but an abomination, gazing fearfully into the crowd. My dear Mikasa, flying through the air and living the life of which she’d dreamed. And me, the father who would promise that they’d never know any semblance of normality again.

“Levi. You know I’d never let any harm come to you or our little ones.” My lover kissed my forehead; the air between his lips was warm against my cool skin. My heart fluttered against my mind’s will. “Trust me.”

My eyes shifted from Erwin’s to Hange’s, taking in their combined excitement and weighing it against my own discomfort. These two meant the world to me. How could I live with myself if I denied them this? I emptied the rest of my beer down my gullet, eager to lose myself to its haze and stop thinking, and stood.

“Fine. I trust you.” I sighed heavily, slamming the metal tankard onto the table. “Let’s start a fucking circus.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all the wonderful comments on the first chapter! This one isn't as long, but I hope it meets your expectations. There will be a lot more action and excitement in the coming chapters; this one is mostly exposition. 
> 
> Language notes:  
> München: Munich  
> Wien: Vienna  
> Liptauer: a spiced cheese spread, Hungarian in origin  
> nein, liebchen: no, sweetheart  
> dunkel: dark beer (the best kind)
> 
> Also, Nana is a trans woman with Klinefelter's syndrome (meaning she has XXY chromosomes and therefore her body is much more "feminine" than people with XY chromosomes) and Mike is XYY, but that condition wasn't identified until the 1960s.
> 
> Anyway, I will be starting school tomorrow, and my schedule will be PACKED. But I'll try to continue updating this as much as possible, as well as working on/starting other fics (I have too many AU's in my brain, help). See you next time!

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr as iosaturnalia; my ask box is always open. Thank you in advance for any kudos and kind comments!


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